I Heart Google, and so do You

Google this year has released one game-changing application after another from App Engine’s release on April 4th to Android’s expected debut the middle of this week. It’s true AppEngine still has some kinks to work out as Aral Balkin points out in his brilliant blog, and the first look of Android is impressive though it will undoubtedly need some refinement. These two technologies will shape computing as a whole well into the next decade.

It’s the lack of hype surrounding Android that’s got me even more pumped about it. Google is pushing the bounds in mobile territory and I think it’s going over alot of people’s heads. The Android OS is a beautifully crafted framework that allows apps to act cooperatively with eachother. A good example is shown in this video Android Apps without Borders. Here you see an application that uses the built in camera to read a bar-code being used in a separate bookstore app to scan bar-codes on books. It’s like being able to use Photoshop’s liquify filter from Dreamweaver.
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Dem Bones Were Made For Walkin’

I probably shouldn’t be showing you this but I can’t help myself. I’ve got my hands on a copy of Flash CS4 so hop in, we’re going for a spin.

Just as we hypothesized, the Bone Tool is amazing. You don’t have to cut up the image before applying bones to any vector. The Bone Tool will use it’s magic to transform the image in the appropriate way allowing you to animate the joints and the skeleton while it applies inverse kinematics keeping your parts attached. You can apply the tool to symbols too! Althought it’s simple to apply bone structures inverse kinematics (IK) comes with a price. The Adobe team has put a great deal of work into the foundation and the principles of IK that will take even a seasoned designer time to master.
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Multi-Player Games With Only Actionscript

I’ve been looking for ways to build communities for almost a decade and one of the key themes has always been real-time connectivity. Of course there’s always polling where you have semi-real time information queried every five or ten seconds from the server, but in order to achieve true real-time you need the ability to push data to your application. There are some options here and I’ve tinkered and fussed with ElectroServer & Flash Media Server to name a few and just like the end of a five minute massage I’ve never been fully satisfied.

The big drawback is that you always had to write some type of server-side code. Come2Play is on course to change this dramatically with their client-side only API for real-time gaming. Let me say that again, with their API you can write real-time, multi-player games with only Actionscript. It will be the first time such a technology is available and it wouldn’t surprise me if they wanted to keep this awesome invention to themselves, but they’ve gone the extra step to make the client API and emulator open-source.
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Flash CS4 – You can finally search the Library!

In their first full-cycle release since acquiring Macromedia you don’t have to be a detective on CSI Miami to see Adobe’s fingerprints all over Flash CS4. In a live product demonstration broadcast on Adobe TV this morning we got to see a preview of the direction Adobe will be going with Flash and it’s all about seamless integration.

One of the first things I noticed is how similar the new features compare to AfterEffects. The Motion Editor in AfterEffects is excellent and you’ll see it’s basically identical. Object based animation is also very similar to that in AfterEffects in essence giving each symbol it’s own timeline. Another useful feature straight from AfterEffects will show you a series of dots, each representing frames of your path giving you precise control of your animations.
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Saved by the Bell

With Creative Suite 4 and Flash 10 just over the horizon it seems a good time to reflect on where we’ve come from. I’m going to share my story of how I fell in love with Flash and what I was watching at the time. Everyone is welcome to share their personal story by posting a comment. Here goes.

Sometimes you just know. Like, when you meet the girl of your dreams something hits you and says this is the one! That’s how it was for me anyway. Way back when Zach Morris (Marc Paul Gosselaar) was pleading with Mr. Belding to put an oil derrick on school grounds (bonus points to anyone who remembers that episode) I started developing social communities. I did the front-end with Java Applets and I even went through the trouble of creating a native XML database to store friends, save conversations, and keep track of election results. The community functioned but it wasn’t extend-able and worst of all, it was dreadfully slow. This prompted dreams of greener pastures with fast, stable, graphics-rich environments.

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